Tormen - BLOCKCHAIN FOR DECISION MAKERS: a systematic guide to using blockchain for improving your business

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First published: September 2019

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ISBN 978-1-83855-227-5

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Romain Tormen is a senior consultant for PwC, a worldwide consulting firm. He has experience of digital transformation within a variety of industries and business units. Specializing in emerging technologies, he promotes the use of blockchain to his clients from the perspective of improved transaction security, transparency, disintermediation, and third-party authentication. He is a contributing writer to one of the most widely read, tech-oriented websites hackernoon. Romain offers business insights and provides use cases for a broad range of industries.

Narendranath Reddy is an experienced full stack blockchain engineer and Hyperledger Fabric expert with a proven track record of helping enterprises to build production-ready, blockchain-backed applications. He is an experienced innovator and creative thinker. He has won four hackathons on blockchain and is a keynote speaker, regularly speaking about blockchain and distributed ledgers. He is currently working as a blockchain software engineer at Consensys, Dubai, having previously worked as a blockchain developer at Blockgemini, Dubai, and as a software developer at UST Global, Trivandrum, and Madrid, Spain.

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Blockchain-based apps, in addition to cryptocurrencies, are being developed in a variety of industries, including banking, the supply chain, and healthcare, in order to achieve digital transformation and enhance the user experience. Blockchain is not only about Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies, but also about different technologies, such as peer-to-peer networks, consensus mechanisms, and cryptography. These technologies together help to sustain trustless environments in which digital value can be transferred between individuals without intermediaries.

This book will help you understand the basics of blockchain, including cryptographic methods, hash functions, and consensus mechanisms. You will then focus on how blockchain is used today in different industries and the technological challenges faced while implementing a blockchain strategy. The book will also enable you, as a decision maker, to understand blockchain from a technical perspective and evaluate its applicability in business. Finally, you'll get to grips with cloud-based solutions and blockchain frameworks, such as Hyperledger and Quorum, and how to use them.

By the end of this book, you will have learned about the current use cases of blockchain and be able to implement a blockchain strategy on your own.

This book is for CXOs, business professionals, organization leaders, decision makers, technology enthusiasts, and managers who wish to understand how blockchain is implemented in different organizations, its impact, and how it can be customized according to business needs. Prior experience with blockchain is not required.

, Basics of Blockchain and the Illustration of Village Beta, aims to provide the reader with a straightforward example in terms of understanding how blockchain truly works and how it can apply to real-life situations. It provides a brief introduction as to why blockchain is a genuine matter for C-level executives and gives an illustration of how it operates.

, A Technical Dive into Blockchain, includes a description of the components of blockchain, as well as a d escription of those stakeholders who compose a blockchain network, before describing a block and its data structure, the hash, the previous hash, the nonce, and the timestamp. We'll then describe hash functions and their role in blockchain as well as discover how cryptography plays an important role in managing identities in the network and identifying stakeholders to provide authentication. We'll introduce symmetric and asymmetric encryption methods and the underlying pairs of keys tied to each account (private and public). We'll explain consensus mechanisms and illustrate the Byzantine Generals Problem, which is the first computer science problem to raise questions regarding consensus in a network in the presence of traitors or faults. We'll eventually go through an explanation of how the network keeps working to achieve truth thanks to game theory and economics.